Design Overview

Tug is intended to be a drop-in replacement for the Pull Server feature included in WMF5. It is written in ASP.NET Core 1.0, is open source, and should be able to run on any machine or OS that can run ASP.NET Core. The machine must also be able to run PowerShell.

Tug is essentially a thin layer. It accepts, via a web server, requests from DSC nodes. When a request is received, Tug attempts to run specific PowerShell commands (which can be cmdlets or functions). It is these commands which provide the actual pull server functionality. This means you can write custom pull server functionality simply by writing the appropriate PowerShell commands. The Tug project is intended to include various sample commands for different scenarios, and you can obviously customize those or write entirely new ones from scratch.

Tug only supports v2 of the Pull Server protocol, which means it only supports nodes running WMF5 or later (inclusive of the open-source LCM client for Linux). Tug will not respond correctly to v1.0 (WMF4) requests. WMF5 nodes must implement ConfigurationNames, not ConfigurationId, or they will not work with Tug (using ConfigurationId forces WMF5 clients into protocol v1 behavior).